Gavin Francis: Doctor with a case of wanderlust charts the journey of our bodies

Gavin Francis said that his love of literature and decade of global travel combined to inspire his latest bookAWAKENING/GETTY IMAGES

When he was a boy, Gavin Francis would sit on the ridge above Carnock, a mining village in West Fife, and take in the view.

“I could see the whole of the Forth valley,” he said. “I had a notion I wanted to see the world beyond. I wasn’t trying to escape. I thought, ‘I’d love to see the Tibetan plateau, I’d love to see the Amazon.’ These are places you see in an atlas but think, ‘I’ll never go there.’”

He was wrong. After a childhood of caravan holidays, in 1998 he volunteered, while still a student, for work at a hospital in Kenya. There was no looking back. Over the next decade, Francis, 43, worked in India and Greenland, served as doctor to…

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